Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!

Mobile redirect better to example.com/m or m.example.com

I've launched a mobile version for a site of mine and I'm trying to identify if it's best to direct mobile users to example.com/m site or m.example.com.

Ideally I would love to see my mobile site showing up for searches on mobile devices but after reading this recent post about skip-redirects (http://www.brysonmeunier.com/skip-redirectold-possum-in-google-smartphone-search-results/) it's not clear to me that if I go the example.com/m route that this can happen.

2 Responses

Typically we build our sites so that example.com detects if the device is mobile, and if so adjusts the CSS sheets to give the mobile version of the site. I like this because you aren't going to mess up any link juice that you've created or might get from users, wont be duplicate content, and all SEO efforts will work versus having to do two campaigns for m.exmpale.com and example.com.

Are you running on a CMS or custom site?

Not sure what this means for Google, but Bing posted 3/7:

At Bing, we want to keep things simple by proposing the "one URL per content item" strategy. For each website, instead of having different URLs per platform (one URL for desktop, another for mobile devices, etc.), our feedback is that producing fewer variations of URLs will benefit you by avoiding sub-optimal and underperforming results. It can help manage unwanted bandwidth usage as well.

If your content is the same for the web and for mobile; and you're looking to simply "provide a mobile optimized design" for the display of your content, I'd recommend you use a custom style sheet for mobile traffic. You won't need to dramatically modify your subdomain this way. http://perishablepress.com/the-5-minute-css-mobile-makeover/

If the mobile version of the content is dramatically different than the "desktop" version of the content, in my opinion, using the "m." subdomain is a much more logical, common, and user-friendly approach than using the "/m/" subfolder.

A very common question we see is: Does it matter if the different types of content are served from the same URL or from different URLs? For example, some websites have www.example.com as the URL desktop browsers are meant to access and have m.example.com or wap.example.com for the different mobile devices. Other websites serve all types of content from just one URL structure like www.example.com.

For Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile, it does not matter what the URL structure is as long as it returns exactly what a user sees too. For example, if you redirect mobile users from www.example.com to m.example.com, that will be recognized by Googlebot-Mobile and both websites will be crawled and added to the correct index. In this case, use a 301 redirect for both users and Googlebot-Mobile.

If you serve all types of content from www.example.com, i.e. serving desktop-optimized content or mobile-optimized content from the same URL depending on the User-agent, this will also lead to correct crawling by Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile. This is not considered cloaking by Google.

It is worth repeating that regardless of URL structure, you must correctly detect the User-agent as given by your users and Googlebot-Mobile, and serve both the same content. Don’t forget to keep the default content, the desktop-optimized content, for when an unknown User-agent requests it.

Hey friend! Have fun exploring Q&A, but in order to ask your own
questions, comment, or give thumbs up, you need to be logged in to your
Moz Pro account.
You can also earn access by receiving 500
MozPoints
from participating in YouMoz and the Moz Blog!
Learn more.